A network, the Cambridge dictionary tells us, is a large system consisting of many similar parts that are connected together to allow movement or communication between or along the parts. Mirriam-Webster defines it first in the textile context: a fabric or structure of cords or wires that cross at regular intervals and are knotted or secured at the crossings. Threads crossing threads. Each node strengthened by its connection to others.

The Good Clothes Network exists on exactly this premise: that independent, responsible, vintage and second-hand fashion businesses, each operating at a scale where influence can feel limited, are more capable of changing things together than apart. And more able to support each other too. After all, a network can become a safety net once its ends are securely tethered.

The network event held on 11 June brought people together who have a shared commitment to do fashion differently, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what a network actually is, and what it can do, in ways that connect directly to the research I want to share this month.

Because the most important thing I’ve learned from co-authoring a peer-reviewed paper in iScience with co-authors from five UK Universities is that knowledge itself is a network. And when a node in that network is missing – when an entire category of evidence isn’t being looked for – the system produces the wrong answer

In 2018, Fashion Revolution published a graphic in our Loved Clothes Last fanzine showing how long different textiles take to decompose. It reflected what most of us believed at that time – most, indeed, still do: that natural fibres biodegrade quickly and therefore disappear. The graphic did the rounds. You’ve probably seen it, or some version of it. But science evolves. And so must we.

After four years of research and writing, our paper was published in iScience in February this year: Stanton, Law, Somers et al., “Natural” Fibres in Lakes: A 150-Year Sedimentary Perspective on Persistence. It came about because of a project that began with citizen science and oral history workshops around the town of Leek, Staffordshire – the Fashion Revolution Restorying Riverscapes project, supported by Keele University. Dyers once flocked to Leek for the purity of its water. Over time, it became the most polluted river in Britain, possibly in Europe. Local people wrote to tell us things that the archives couldn’t, including stories about catching purple fish. Nearby Rudyard Lake sits downstream from historic textile and paper mills (back then, paper was made from old rags).

Our next question was what the lake itself held in its archives. In March 2022, I went out on the lake with researchers from Loughborough, Keele and Northumbria Universities in a small boat, and we lowered a cylindrical core sampler into the sediment. None of us quite realised, at that point, how significant that tube of lake mud would be.

Months later, the results came back. Cotton accounted for 70% of everything recovered and was present throughout the entire record, from the most recent layers down to the oldest, extrapolated to around 1876. Wool appeared in the deepest sections. Natural fibres – typically dyed and chemically treated during processing – were still structurally identifiable more than a century after deposition. The paper’s conclusion is carefully worded: biodegradation of natural fibres cannot be assumed.

This raised an immediate question: why hadn’t we known this before? The answer turns out to be a network problem. Because researchers had focused primarily on synthetic microfibres – polyester, acrylic, nylon – laboratory methods had evolved to dissolve everything natural in order to isolate and count the plastic. Natural fibres weren’t considered a problem worth measuring, so the methods weren’t designed to find them. When we left the fibres intact, the only things that dissolved were my certainties.

When I posted about the paper on Instagram, the response was immediate and revealing. Some said: of course fibres don’t biodegrade without oxygen. And they’re right that sediment is anoxic. But those fibres had to get there first, travelling from mills into streams, into an open lake, settling over years or decades before reaching those conditions. Others asked: do natural fibres in the environment even matter? They do, because of chemical load. Natural textile fibres carry not just the chemistry of their processing, but can sorb and release pollutants along the way. When they partially degrade, which is not the same as biodegrading, this may accelerate chemical release.

The paper does not say natural fibres are dangerous. It says we don’t yet have enough evidence to answer that question fully. And across freshwater systems, seabed cores and airborne samples, the same pattern is beginning to emerge in studies by different teams using different methods: when researchers count all fibres, not just synthetics, natural fibres dominate. The research field built itself around a missing node, and the network has been producing incomplete results ever since.

This is not an argument against natural fibres. It is an argument for understanding them properly. The real question, is not natural versus synthetic. It is what are we putting into the environment, in what form, and – crucially – at what volume.

And there are answers, or at least the beginnings of them.  When researching my book The Nature of Fashion: A Botanical Story of Our Material Lives  I travelled to Mórrope in northern Peru to meet Yolanda Contreras who has spent decades reviving native coloured cotton – brown and beige, yellow and orange, lilac and green, growing its colour through the plant’s own ecology rather than through a dye vat. What coloured cotton carries into the environment is a fundamentally different story from a dyed, mercerised, chemically-finished industrial fibre. That difference matters. Making with a material rather than against it, following its ecology rather than overriding it, leads to a different set of consequences.

For those running responsible, independent fashion brands and for those selling vintage and second-hand, there is something else worth knowing. The first wash is the greatest when it comes to fibre shedding. A garment that has been washed before – a vintage piece, a second-hand find – has already shed most of what it will shed, at least until it really starts to fall apart. In a world where we are only beginning to understand what natural and synthetic fibres do once they enter waterways and human bodies, this is far from a trivial consideration. The second-hand market has an environmental argument around fibre shedding that it hasn’t fully developed yet.

For those making new garments from natural materials: the environmental story of a fibre runs from the soil where the plant grew, through every chemical applied to process, dye and finish it. And it carries on into whatever waterway receives the fibres that washing releases, or the atmosphere in the case of vented tumble dryers. Be honest about which parts of that story you can verify and those you cannot. (And please don’t post images on socials showing your garment ‘biodegrading’ in soil without testing the soil around it for fibres and disclosing the results!)

This research was the scientific starting point for The Nature of Fashion, an epic sweep through over 40,000 years of making with plants. What might we recover if we look more carefully at what we already know?

A network is a system of interconnected things. What the Rudyard Lake sediment holds is its own kind of network – the connection between the mills on the River Dane, the water that carried their traces downstream, the lake bed that preserved them, and the researchers, local historians and community volunteers who finally decided to look. Knowledge moved through that network slowly, over 150 years, before we recovered it in a tube of sediment on a cold March morning.

The Good Clothes Network is a different kind of system, but the same principle applies. Change moves through connections. The threads that unite us, strengthen the whole.

Stanton, T., Law, A., Somers, C. et al. ‘”Natural” Fibres in Lakes: A 150-Year Sedimentary Perspective on Persistence.’ iScience 29, 114904 (2026)